Review:

on 2012-03-05 Carlita Said:

Revisiting "Even Closer" 11 years later, Goapele's first album released on her own label, am immediately transported back to that early space in time, the beginning of the 00's. Featuring the shell of "Closer", her debut EP which sold modestly through limited means, "Even Closer" added a few new tracks to this shell and introduced Goapele to a broader audience. I discovered Goapele by chance, going to see Floetry a few years ago. Opening for the poetry-spitting, sultry singing duo, she was the perfect complement. Doing several songs off this album, the underground Bay Area soul songwriter whose dreads I would have loved to rock at the time, left an impression. She spoke of many identifiable themes a person right out of college would be primed to hear- aspirations for a better life, communicating your emotional needs to a lover, family strife caused by an absent parent and asserting one's independence in young adulthood.

Her soothing distinctive voice glides you, the listener, like a modern dancer through peaks and valleys, song after song, which fits, being that her name means "to move forward" in Setswana, a South African language, highlighting her multi-ethnic heritage. I barely realized an hour passed as I seemed to quickly hit the end of the CD. Although most would select "Closer" as the album's best song, which achieved moderate success and featured on one of Drake's pre-superstardom mixtapes, "Romantic", produced by the jazz trio, Soulive, remains its stand-out track that makes you want to seduce someone like the subject of the song. Other favorites on the album are "Butterflykisses", on which you can't help but be drawn to the bass, the gentle jazz-infused "Things Don't Exist", and "The Daze" featuring hot verses by Bay Area MCs, duo Zion I and Casual. "Even Closer" stands as a good artistic beginning but you knew there was more story to tell and as Robert Frost stated in one of his poems, she had "miles to go before she slept".

Rating: 7/10